dml2135

What is your definition of "evidence" here? The evidence, in my view, are physical (as in, available computing power) and algorithmic limitations.

We don't expect steel to suddenly have new properties, and we don't expect bubble sort to suddenly run in O(n) time. You could ask -- well what is the evidence they won't, but it's a silly question -- the evidence is our knowledge of how things work.

Saying that improvement in AI is inevitable depends on the assumption of new discoveries and new algorithms beyond the current corpus of machine learning. They may happen, or they may not, but I think the burden of proof is higher on those spending money in a way that assumes it will happen.

It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth.

There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s.

We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth.

Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century.

The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years.

"Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.

Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.

IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

This was not my experience on the NY exchange but that was several years ago at this point. So I guess it's possible that things improved.

I qualified my initial comment with "for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition".

And my comment is not about people thinking they'd be getting rich -- it's about people making a (or what should be) reasonable assumption that they'd make enough money to pay off their tuition without lifelong financial struggle.

Yes, state schools are the smart choice here.

My point is it's not all on the student, they are victims to a large extent. We should also place blame on these elite institutions for suckering in young adults with their prestige and then not delivering a product that is worth what they charge. And on the government for providing a blank check for this nonsense.

Anyway, I do think we're mostly in agreement. And btw, I'm fine, I'm just speaking from the experiences of many of my peers, which have left me pretty teed-off at a prestigious university in my city that I will refrain from calling out by name.

I'm not talking about worthless schools -- I'm talking about the Ivy Leagues.

Worthless degrees, yes, but why are we not holding our most prestigious schools responsible for charging outlandish prices for worthless degrees? They are the ones with power misleading young adults who maybe should know better but guess what, they often don't, and that's a mistake but not one that should ruin you financially for the rest of your life.

But yes, you are right that this is not the majority of student loan borrowers.

But that means nothing if you can't find a doctor -- these plans have paltry networks.

They are better than nothing if you qualify for a subsidy, but if you don't and you live in a HCOL area (which the subsidies are not adjusted for) you are pretty much screwed.

They are not the same plans. Most employer plans are not available to the individual market. The marketplace plans often have vastly reduced networks, higher premiums, higher deductibles, etc.

Others have replied saying why this may not be the case, but even if it is — you also need to balance efficiency with other values, such as independence and resiliency.

I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.

That $6,000 would be about $13,000 today.

That is a very manageable amount of debt.

Many people have student debts that are 10-20x that, or more. Minimum payments of thousands of dollars a month, and no ability to discharge them through bankruptcy.

You can take on a few thousand dollars of debt as a young adult, realize you made a mistake, grind to pay it off and chalk it up as a life lesson.

We are letting young adults today make mistakes that they will never get an opportunity to learn from, because they will be paying for it their entire life. It is vastly different from your example.

Add “a global pandemic turning your university experience into Zoom-school with no reduction in tuition” to the list of possible hazards there.

No, it’s not flawed and it’s not a hypothesis — I’m speaking from specific knowledge and experience regarding particular degrees.

Those averages include things like medical school for doctors and law school for lawyers. Tuition and expected salary are more aligned there.

Where tuition and salary are not aligned are fields like the humanities and social sciences. At top graduate schools for those fields you will have tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with average salary expectations far below that.

The only way that it makes financial sense to get a degree like that is if you are independently wealthy to begin with, but these schools will not tell you that and will cheerfully direct you to take on a ruinous amount of debt.

Practically, this makes no sense though. Those that do not complete school are the ones that will have the hardest time paying back their loans. You are just burying people further in their own failures.

Young people make mistakes. It does not benefit society to make those mistakes ruin their lives.

Okay but again — be pissed at the government for making bad loans in the first place, not for writing them off when it is impossible for them to be repaid.

I’m specifically talking about professional, graduate degrees. Undergrad is a different matter.

A professional degree should give you an opportunity to increase your income in proportion to the cost of the degree. If that is not even close to being the case, as is what happens with a lot of degrees at elite schools, then I’d call that what it is — a scam.

The loans should not be given out, but also schools should not be charging the sort of tuition that they do for professional degrees, for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition.

For real, it’s basically predatory. And I’m not talking about BS degrees from crap online schools.

What the Ivy Leagues charge for certain graduate degrees in the social sciences is basically a huge scam. There is absolutely no viable pathway to pay back the $200,000+ cost of a graduate degree in social sciences from a school like Columbia or Harvard, other than public service loan forgiveness, if you actually want to work in the field that the degree ostensibly prepares you for.

I know people that got grad degrees like this and then ended up going to coding bootcamps so they could work in tech to pay them off.

On the flip side, your tax dollars made a bad loan. Usually, when a creditor did a bad job underwriting and makes a loan that cannot be repaid, the creditor is made to eat the cost.

google “The Daria Restoration Project”

This is like saying that because of all the advancements that automobiles have made, teleportation is right around the corner.

They will publish a list

> (h) Published List of Occupations Traditionally Receiving Tips.-- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury (or the Secretary's delegate) shall publish a list of occupations which customarily and regularly received tips on or before December 31, 2024, for purposes of section 224(d)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (as added by subsection (a)).

It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop.

There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on your own personal streaming service on your TV a few minutes later.

I really love that enough movie nerds came in there and asked about Laserdisc and Betamax that it became part of the spiel.

Notion just seems to get worse and worse. I used to love it but now I find it infuriatingly slow.

Glad to hear Obsidian is better as I’ve been considering it as an alternative.

Ha, this reminds me of a story from my old job, before I became a software engineer.

I worked for an artist and we had an inventory system that a freelance web developer had built for us. I think it was some sort of php, laravel, mysql stack. There was a search bar that you could use to bring up records of artworks.

Everyone at the studio used this system but I was the main person that used it. Over time, I picked up some little tricks here and there. These were useful because engaging this freelance guy for new features involved a lot of back and forth, so if I could find my own improvement to a workflow that was always the easier option.

We didn't have a clear way to pull up works for a single decade. Until I somehow discovered that you could use `%` as a wildcard character in some cases, so I could pull up paintings from the 1970s but searching for `197%`, for example.

I remember proudly telling this to the freelance dev at one point and his eyes widened and he almost looked panicked. In retrospect I recognize that he was thinking about whether he left the system open to an injection attack.

By the end of my job there I had learned enough about this to realize it was a risk but didn't get curious enough to see if a `; DROP TABLE` query would work.

Physical junk mail is the USPS' bread and butter, so it's not surprising that they have no qualms about sending email spam either.

That's interesting to hear. It may be completely true, I don't really know. The source of my skepticism, however, is that all of the incentives are there for them to not be transparent about this, and to make the cars appear "smarter" than they really are.

Even if it's just a high level instruction set, it's possible that that occurs often enough to present scaling issues. It's also totally possible that it's not a problem, only time will tell.

What I have in mind is the Amazon stores, which were sold as being powered by AI, but were actually driven by a bunch of low-paid workers overseas watching cameras and manually entering what people were putting in their carts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

So just to confirm, you are saying that "network port analysis" is NOT used to determine if someone has entered a zoom meeting?

Do we even know what % of Waymo rides in SF are completely autonomous? I would not be surprised if more of them are remotely piloted than they've let on...

Why didn't Notion ask for my affirmative consent before monitoring my network traffic?

Are there other cases where Notion is monitoring my network traffic? If so, what are they?